Security Utopias in Catastrophic Times

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nina Perkowski
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

This project examines security from the perspective of marginalised groups – not as passive recipients of security policies, but as active subjects who transform the meaning and practice of security. Historically, women, racial minorities, and migrants have never been fully included in the liberal promise of protection and are now witnessing the systematic dismantling of even limited existing safeguards. This erosion is taking place during a time of unprecedented challenges to the institutional foundations of liberal democracies and is intensified by worsening ecological crises, which disproportionately affect marginalised groups and further increase their existing vulnerabilities. The historical marginalisation of counter-communities – groups characterised by experiences of domination, mutual recognition, and distance from dominant structures (Loick, 2024) – has compelled these communities to develop alternative protection mechanisms that fundamentally challenge state-centred security concepts. These alternative conceptions of security are gaining increasing importance as conventional security promises remain unfulfilled for broader segments of society. The project addresses three central research questions: How do counter-communities transform security through alternative protection practices? How do they maintain collective agency in times of shrinking political spaces? How do their practices prefigure alternative security relations and imaginations? In doing so, the project develops the concept of ‘security utopias’, drawing on contemporary utopianism and everyday security studies to examine how counter-communities combine immediate protective practices with prefigurative experiments in creating different forms of protection. The analysis focuses on security practices, imaginations, and relations, using participatory and qualitative methods in three urban contexts representing different stages of liberal erosion: Oakland (analysing how abolitionist and mutual aid traditions shape responses to acute institutional crisis), Milan (exploring how feminist and migrant movements navigate gradual democratic backsliding), and London (examining how sustained intersectional organising enables responses to long-term institutional retrenchment). Through comparative analysis across these contexts, the project pursues two central objectives: first, to develop ‘security utopias’ as an analytical lens for understanding how marginalised communities re-imagine and prefigure protection outside dominant paradigms; second, to generate systematic empirical evidence on how diverse communities implement alternative security practices in response to different patterns of institutional failure. Ultimately, the project seeks to demonstrate how alternative security frameworks not only emerge from positions of marginality in catastrophic times, but also have the potential to transform collective understandings of security beyond the limits of liberal paradigms.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5870: The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times